muscular endurance

Terry I was reffering to your 23+ minute mile you were telling us you did and not anyone else that cannot swim effortlessly like you. I have to use effort to swim even one length of the pool and I am sure I move a lot of water everytime I swim and I surely cause waves. If you don't want comments don't post. You are welcome to comment on anything I say.

I wonder if this swimming flatter requires recovering with a straighter arm because in my personal experience swimming flatter with a high elbow recovery is a recipe for shoulder problems.

Well...I am certainly faster with more rotation. Flat swimming was really hurting my stroke rate and my cut through the water.

Morgan, what's your best golf score and what combo of strokes and seconds did you use? My best is 57 which was 32 sec at 25 strokes. I'm a distance swimmer. When I coached the Army sprinters, my best male swimmer had a best golf score of 41 - 16 strokes and 25 seconds. He went 44.1 for the 100 Free. My two best women both scored 48 - 18 strokes and 30 seconds. They both went 52 for the 100. These scores were all from pushoff. My best score is a 44. 26 seconds 18 strokes but I have no idea how I did that. Normally, I average more around 48 as well...swimming a 27 and taking 21 strokes. But even that takes a great deal of effort and concentration and I can only do one at a time, with a good deal of rest if I have to do it again...otherwise it gets ugly. My best 100time is a 55.1 but I have been swimming disgusting 58s this season and I do not know what I am doing wrong:shakeshead::confused:

An aquaintance who is a college strength and conditioning coach recently did this experiment. He tested everyone on the team for maximum bench press (one rep). The sprinters, on average, could lift substantially more weight than the distance swimmers. On another day, when everyone was rested, he asked all his swimmers to see how many reps they could do at 70% of their maximum. No sprinter could do over 10 reps, while the distance folks averaged over 20 reps. This is interesting. Personally, I max out at 255 or 260 (I only do this once or twice per year). 70% of that is around 180. I can do that 12-14 times fresh. Unsurprisingly, I am a sprinter. As others have more sensibly pointed out, to Warren's original question, the reason you are experiences the muscle fatigue is because that is the way you were designed! You should feel blessed (Warren). You are a pure sprinter!

Even so, that isn't true race pace. What did they change, if anything, in a race? My point is that sprinting, for me at least, seems like a completely different stroke. Perhaps it's because I trained for middle distance and, lacking sprinting ability, never properly learned how to sprint. I think Gull has a point here. I swim freestyle completely differently depending on whether I'm drop dead sprinting or swimming any kind of 200+ freestyle set. And I learned how to sprint. Still feels really different.

Different as in you kick harder and catch/pull with less/no delay? That is different but I would not call it a whole other stroke. I think it is a variation of freestyle that is adjusted to yield a faster turnover rate in the arms and a kick at maximum effort. I guess that's accurate. Plus, I have straighter arms when I sprint. It's basically, Sprint: straight arms, finish, kick hard, high SR, catch/pull with less/no delay or Everything else: flexed elbow, more front quadrant, more rotatation, less kicking, delay on catch, more breathing, lower SPL So, its seems different.

When "shifting" into sprint mode (50/100), your turnover will increase, your kick will pick up and your body position should naturally flatten out.....very little rotation is occuring. I also agree that the successful sprinters these days (USS & Masters) all have incredible kicks.....Ian Crocker actually used an underwater dolphin kick 15m off his start and all 3 turns several years ago when he went 42+ and won the 100 free at NCAA's....

Different as in you kick harder and catch/pull with less/no delay? That is different but I would not call it a whole other stroke. I think it is a variation of freestyle that is adjusted to yield a faster turnover rate in the arms and a kick at maximum effort.

I also have the sensation that my sprint freestyle is quite different from my longer distance freestyle. Clearly both are "freestyle" so it isn't a different stroke in that sense but it feels like sprinting is not just the same thing done faster. I have been wondering if this is just because I don't have the skill to maintain the timing and technique I use in middle distance at higher speed, or whether there are real concrete differences in timing. I know that with butterfly I swim "distance fly" very differently than "sprint fly" and while they are both butterfly I think that minimizing the differences to a few differences in timing would be to miss the point because the difference between poor swimming and good swimming is often a matter of timing. For example look at the effort Terry puts into synchronizing his kick and hand entry.